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Ninjas: Sissy Pirates

By Ben Mcdole ⋅ December 1, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

In my last arti­cle I talked about the Duel Decks series, par­tic­u­larly the awe­some mas­culin­ity of pirates. The feed­back on that deck have been very good, with a lot of peo­ple con­tact­ing me to let me know pre­cisely how much fun they’ve been hav­ing. This week I hope to pla­cate those of you who are fans of the stealth­ier ele­ment, Ninjas.

In the inter­est of full dis­clo­sure I find myself firmly entrenched in the pirate camp, but I can see how nin­jas might appeal to some play­ers. Nin­jas are stealth per­son­i­fied, pre­fer­ring crafty schemes over brute force, can­nons and lusty wenches. That is fine how­ever it takes a com­pletely dif­fer­ent mind­set to accomplish.

The best way I could find to pre­pare myself was a com­bi­na­tion of watch­ing Ninja Assas­sin trail­ers and perus­ing the orig­i­nal deck­list that WotC put forth. Here is the list orig­i­nally previewed:

As is the prob­lem with most EDH decks we need to come up with a Gen­eral. Notice that the deck is four col­ors… again. Pirates were four to five col­ors by neces­sity but I don’t think we need to go four col­ors with nin­jas. Green is barely in the orig­i­nal deck, only show­ing up in the form of a sin­gle for­est and an Argoth­ian Boars. While I do respect Argoth­ian Boars I think we could eas­ily find an in-color card to serve the same pur­pose (which if you read the orig­i­nal arti­cle was sim­ply subterfuge!)

Hav­ing pared the deck down to a mere three col­ors we now need to find a suit­able gen­eral. As is the case with Pirates, func­tion­al­ity is really less impor­tant than fla­vor. Though there are a few tempt­ing leg­ends at our dis­posal, Sol’Kanar the Swamp King for exam­ple, I think the ideal leg­end is Tet­suo Umezawa. Tet­suo has a use­ful abil­ity, fills the fla­vor of the gen­eral and most impor­tantly the art shows a per­son with a samu­rai sword! Though Tet­suo is now a human archer as a crea­ture type I feel he’s still a ninja at heart.

Hav­ing selected our gen­eral we need to fix a few prob­lems with the main deck. Again “Un” cards are fun to have but we want to abide by the rules of EDH which means they need to go. There are two Ass Whup­pin! that need to go and a sin­gle copy of Kill! Destroy! that we need to cut as well. Com­pared to pirates there are con­sid­er­ably fewer un-cards that cause us headaches.

Unfor­tu­nately there are a few other cards that need to dis­ap­pear to pre­serve for­mat legal­ity. Walker of Secret Ways, Throat Slit­ter, Skull­snatcher, Okiba-Gang Shi­nobi, Ninja of the Deep Hours, and Mist­blade Shi­nobi all have mul­ti­ple copies which need to be dealt with. Addi­tion­ally, though I love the fla­vor of five copies of Sud­den Death (5 copies!) we need to go ahead and make that a sin­gle copy. This almost gives us a legal deck for the for­mat but there’s another prob­lem to be dealt with.

There are cur­rently cards in the deck which are not allowed. With Tet­suo only being three col­ors any green cards need to be removed as well. With that we bid adieu to Argoth­ian Swine who vio­lates the color restric­tions. The sin­gle For­est is not a col­ored card but it also needs to be removed from the deck since it tech­ni­cally has the green mana sym­bol on the card.

A mere fif­teen cards have been removed! That was me being sar­cas­tic, nin­jas have been much more dif­fi­cult to work with than pirates, though maybe it’s their mys­ti­cal ways. With fif­teen cards hav­ing been removed and only a sin­gle card hav­ing been added we have a total of forty-six cards giv­ing a mighty big fifty-four spots to fill. That num­ber might be a bit mis­lead­ing though, since there are also lands to be added. Since lands are the least fun aspect of the deck (usu­ally) we turn to the rest of the deck first.

Assum­ing that we want 40 lands we get to add thirty-seven non-land cards. Being forced to cut so many crea­tures causes things to be a lit­tle light on the offen­sive. Though I know that nin­jas received a fair amount of cov­er­age dur­ing Kami­gawa block, the num­ber of crea­tures with the actual type of ninja is sur­pris­ingly lack­ing. I’ve decided to off­set that void of nin­jas with an assas­sin sub­theme. Assas­sins also thrive on night and trick­ery and if recent major motion pic­tures are any indi­ca­tion then they actu­ally go hand in hand.

For­tu­nately there are a great num­ber of assas­sins who are also in color. Royal Assas­sin, Garza’s Assas­sin, Suq’Ata Assas­sin, Night­shade Assas­sin, Stalk­ing Assas­sin and Silent Assas­sin all have com­pa­ra­ble abil­i­ties while keep­ing scurvy pirates at bay. Addi­tion­ally, Nekrataal and Orzhov Euthanist are assas­sins with great enter the bat­tle­field abil­i­ties. Mur­der­ous Red­cap is cer­tainly less reli­able than the other two “enter the bat­tle­field” assas­sins, yet has a more flex­i­ble abil­ity. Finally, there are two leg­endary assas­sins with very rel­e­vant abil­i­ties in the form of Kiku, Night’s Flower and Thrax­imundar.

There are a few non-assassins who will be enter­ing the deck. Nezumi Ronin has a fear­some ninja-esque look and so I’ve added him to the mix. Scar­blade Elite cer­tainly plays well with the sub­theme and as such is absolutely nec­es­sary. Finally, Shadow Guild­mage gives us some much needed com­bat tricks since we are usu­ally happy to have some nin­jas in hand. Ok, so Shadow Guild­mage isn’t the last crea­ture added. Zodiac Pig gives us an in color alter­na­tive to Argoth­ian Swine. Trick­ery is still alive!

In addi­tion to the large num­ber of crea­tures added to the deck I’ve tossed in some great fla­vor­ful cards. Assassin’s Blade and Doom Blade both get the feel of a great effec­tive killing stroke. There are also a few pieces of equip­ment that should be in the deck. Tat­sumasa, the Dragon’s Fang is a sword! How can you not have a sword in a ninja deck? Same goes for Umezawa’s Jitte, a ninja sta­ple. Now that we’ve appro­pri­ately armed our ninja clan we need a place for them to dwell.

Lands are a big issue for every deck and ours is no excep­tion. Hav­ing cut the sin­gle for­est we drop to twenty-three lands, mean­ing there is room for sev­en­teen more. Most of the great fla­vor­ful lands have already been added, but I have found a few more that are both effec­tive and full of flavor.

Shizo, Death’s Store­house and Shinka, the Blood­soaked Keep help give our leg­ends var­i­ous use­ful abil­i­ties while stay­ing in the whole Ori­en­tal theme. Shizo makes nin­jas par­tic­u­larly pow­er­ful since it enables a great many crea­tures to attack unblocked. Urborg, Tomb of Yawg­moth also ties in with the whole death and dark­ness theme with the added ben­e­fit of smooth­ing out any swamp issues. River of Tears smoothes mana issues while pro­vid­ing some art that feels right at home with what we are doing.

The final three non-basic lands being added are of a hiding/treachery theme, Tem­ple of the False God, Ancient Tomb, and City of Trai­tors. All three lands let us ramp up mana while rep­re­sent­ing var­i­ous ninja aspects rather effec­tively. In order to round out the mana base and fin­ish the deck up we add four Islands, five Moun­tains and one swamp. It’s worth not­ing that the rea­son I went light on the swamp is par­tially due to the extra non-basic lands tap­ping for black and par­tially due to Urborg ide­ally mak­ing the extra swamps irrelevant.

So let’s take a look at our final­ized list:

Despite my best efforts the ninja deck is con­sid­er­ably more effi­cient than the pirates deck. I can’t say it’s too much of a sur­prise since nin­jas were a legit­i­mately sup­ported tribal mechanic, but with any luck we might see some more love for pirates in the future. I felt like it would be a lit­tle unfair, but if needed one could add some changeling cards to either deck to play off both themes and subthemes.

That’s it for our explo­ration of Wiz­ards’ April Fool’s joke. I hope you have fun play­ing these decks and I encour­age you to post your results in the com­ments sec­tion! I want you to tell me who you think should win the ulti­mate bat­tle: Pirates vs. Ninjas!

Until the next time this is Ben­jamin McDole giv­ing you a hun­dred rea­sons to play Magic!

My name is Benjamin McDole and I’m a level 2 judge from Tampa, Florida. When I’m not teaching math at a local college or spending time with my wife I’m usually playing EDH at Armada Games or running some events. My long term goal is to make sure everyone enjoys Magic and especially EDH as much as I do. I’m a member of a few organizations, Team Lives in the Red Zone and the American Association for the Advancement of Pie (I’m the only member!)

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